Experts hail new breed of computers

Consultant says high-performance machines favoured in wide range of research

One computer just isn’t enough for doing research anymore, says a computational research consultant.

Ross Dickson, with the Atlantic Computational Excellence Network, isn’t talking about desktop or laptop computers that many households collect, but rather supercomputers or high-performance ones that are rapidly gaining popularity in research.

Researchers in fields ranging from finance to chemistry are increasingly turning to the machines to sort through immense amounts of data.

“Suddenly, one machine isn’t enough anymore for doing research,” Dickson said Wednesday. “We’ve started assembling them into these things we call clusters. We take a whole bunch of machines that are basically equivalent to laptops, stick them all in big racks and then start — using thousands of them at the same time.”

ACEnet, a consortium of Atlantic Canadian universities that provides researchers with access to high-performance computing resources, and its national partner, Compute Canada, are holding a high-performance computing conference in Halifax this week. Computational researchers from university, industry and government are discussing impacts of supercomputers on scientific discovery and innovation.

“This is how we have been forecasting weather for years, but we are also using (high-performance computers) now to look at climate change, to solve engineering problems. Any problem that a scientist is interested in takes a lot of computing now, handling enormous volumes of data,” Dickson said in an interview.

The recent growth in applications for supercomputers in fields such as finance, medicine and physics will lead to improvements in the technology, said Paul Crumley, a senior technical staff member at IBM’s research centre in Yorktown Heights, New York.

“My opinion is that now we find new ways to use supercomputers that provides a motivation to find better ways to build them to get those answers that science or society is looking for, ” he said in an interview.

“The more you use it and the more brains you have using it, the faster it expands.”

Crumley said supercomputers allow researchers to ask “what if,” which leads to unexpected discovery. Supercomputers are willing to try things that humans “may think is stupid or our education has taught is wrong,” he said.

“I think it is willing to go and do experiments that humans think are a waste of time … because of that it allows you to find something humans wouldn’t have found because all of their insight and training tells them it is a waste of time trying.”

Compute Canada, the national organization for advanced computing, rotates the location of the annual conference, now being held at the Westin Nova Scotian. It runs through Friday.